Given all of the storms that have surrounded me and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles recently, God’s grace finally helped me to understand: I am not being called to serve Jesus in humility. Rather, I am being called to something deeper–to be humiliated, disgraced, and rebuffed by many.

I was not ready for this challenge. Ash Wednesday changed all of that, and I see Lent 2013 as a special time to reflect deeply upon this special call by Jesus.

To be honest with you, I have not reached the point where I can actually pray for more humiliation. I’m only at the stage of asking for the grace to endure the level of humiliation at the moment.

In the past several days, I have experienced many examples of being humiliated. In recent days, I have been confronted in various places by very unhappy people. I could understand the depth of their anger and outrage–at me, at the Church, at about injustices that swirl around us.

Thanks to God’s special grace, I simply stood there, asking God to bless and forgive them.

One of my readers, an orthodox Catholic theologian, sent the link and added:

I have to think he’s a clinical narcissist, a sociopath. I’ve known a few. This isn’t merely ego or being a strange assertive duck, but something clinical. If not demonic.

Oh just think of the afterlife when Roger discovers that his roomate is Michael Jackson. And of course the moment when Satan greets him and says, “Welcome Roger. We’ve been waiting for you. See, we have something for you.”

And Roger saith, “Whazzat?”

And Satan spake thus, “Oh this big round rock with a hole in the middle. I think it used to be called a millstone. But no one knows what a millstone was any more so we just call it a big, round rock with a hole in the middle.”

To which Roger replies in shock, “Hey, I though it meant a little grinder wheel, like you put on your drill!”

And Satan ruefully shook his head and said unto Roger, “That’s why I keep telling the Big Guy that he needs to have that Bible rewritten. No one knows what anything in it means any more. Now, if you two demons over there will stop buggering the Pope and help me get this thing on Roger’s neck…”

Margaret Carlson and Ramesh Ponnuru, over at Bloomberg, are having a back-and-forth on the legacy of Benedict. Here is the latest post (Ponnuru comes down hard on Mahoney) – the earlier ones are linked at the top:

This is the same soul, the same moral imagination, that had the responsibility of protecting his flock?
This is the man that was asked to shepherd his flock and protect them from the spirit of the age?
Feh.
Like the Bourbons, here is a man who learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Invincible pride, cloaked in the manyle of contrition and humility.

Rod, you will not recall, but we had a brief correspondence when you were at National Review on the scandals. I wrote to my new bishop from Boston, [name supplied gladly upon request since truth is a defense] asking him to assume his office with some manifest sign of expiation for his time scuttling up the slippery pole in the Boston chancery. He rejected my suggestion that he either resign or choose to reside in the diocese’s meanest rectory. in fact, by the time our correspondence ended he was urging me to seek psychiatric counsel to deal with my anger. (Again, that damned resort to the therapeutic society of Philip Rieff.)

Cue Flannery:
…”the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. ”

Is it any surprise that people who believe themselves to be God’s chosen representatives on earth, imbued with magical powers to intercede between God and man, would turn out to be narcissistic megalomaniacs able to excuse even their worst behaviors, and to think the most important thing in the world is to preserve their own status and power, rather than to humble themselves before the living God, and be servants to others? Not only does all that power and prestige corrupt, but it attracts corruption like spoiled meat does flies. This is what comes of such imaginative fantasies as “apostolic succession”. To reform the Church truly, it must give up its conceits, and bow fully to the ground before God.

This guy talks the way my most unrepentant and narcissistic clients talk. The vast majority of my clients show more humility and decency than this joker. Any decent lawyer would tell him to start exercising his right to remain silent, now.

Hilaire Belloc famously said of the Catholic Church that it is “an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

Belloc loved the Church and so do I; but the continued narcissistic babblings of Cardinal Mahony must be answered in all seriousness with Christ’s own words to Satan: “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.” I’m afraid His Eminence may be very near sinning against the Holy Ghost. If a man has reached the point where he believes good to be evil and evil to be good, how can he repent?

I take back all the mean things I ‘ve said about Rod Dreher’s trashy National Enquirer style headlines. That’s the best headline I’ve read in a long time anywhere, and the link lead to a stunning read.

“We all know what “chutzpah” means, but nowadays there is need of a word for what goes beyond it–the next degree of insolent moral dyslexia. Perhaps “Mahonism” would do.”
Perhaps “Mahoney” itself could work. To pull a Mahoney, or a load of Mahoney.

“I am not being called to serve Jesus in humility. Rather, I am being called to something deeper–to be humiliated, disgraced, and rebuffed by many.”

OMG, how some people can be utterly self-deluding boggles the mind. But this guy actually believes he can put his mental illness out for display and convice people that he is normal. What a sick and pathetic bastard! He talks of humiliation and disgrace as if he were a poor martyr and that is what God wants of him, when in fact he aided and abetted the humiliation, disgrace and in many case destruction of innocent young human lives. I hope for Mahony’s sake that God truly does work in strange and mysterious ways because I cannot conceive of redemption for the likes of him as anything other than strange and mysterious – if not PERVERSE!

I grew up a Catholic in Northern California and went to a renowned high school; I found out not long ago that one of the priests teaching us was a serial child-rapist who had been shielded. This man who taught us about the love of God and purported to intercede on God’s behalf to provide us with the bread of life and forgiveness of sins actually had a secret life where he raped children UNDER TEN YEARS OF AGE (perhaps that explains why he was moved to a high school, as we were too old for his taste) and threatened them with death were they to reveal what he had done. Perhaps he was a truly deranged sociopath, but that cannot excuse the Church’s actions in covering for him and moving him into a position where he could harm more.

FLASHBACK: “It was a masterpiece of banal self-delusion, completely untethered from reality and without any acceptance of responsibility. It was entirely self-focused, as if he were the victim. It was, in short, ridiculous.” —Prosecutor Joseph E. McGettigan III (on convicted felon Jerry Sandusky’s rambling, narcissistic pre-sentencing remarks)

it’s hard for me to read this stuff, b/c i once dated a clinical narcissist, a weekly communicant mind, and the pattern is the same: the fixation on one’s own experience, which is always to be justified, and the utter disregard of the fact that anyone else’s experience matters or even that anyone else has experiences.

So by the virtue of new actual interviews, no interpersonal interactions of depth legnth, no f2f assessments, many of you presume to determine who is a ‘clinically diagnosed narccissist?

Is this revelation from a higher power or the result of superior powers of personality assessments based on supposition, anger, revenge or mere bad mouthing?

So anyone accused who dares defend themselves is a narccissist —–? Just how much accountability must they accept before they no longer meet the standard you seem to have created by virtue of these astute observations . . .

If in the Sandusky case you anything more than the psychological visions and memories — do offer it to make your case.

And just so I take your perspective at face value, all defense of oneself is self focussed — on one’s defense. Most of you are more frightening than those seem intent on casting into the ‘pit.’

I know who people who barely went a year for a good portion of their lives being stopped by the police. Over a twenty year life that amounts to twenty police interactions. By the analysis I hear, you seem to be suggesting that any attempt by them to defend against such behavior is narcissitic. A most disappointing condition, coming from a community that prides itself on intellectual accumen.

I have spent a good many years working with youths in a variety of settings and on rare occassion in some very intense, frightening and sad circumstances. In truth, no one who deals with kids troubled or not can find themselves quite innocently in circumstances which ought to be perfectly safe and sane – but left to certain individuals could be turned into nightmares. Fortunately, and but by grace, people knew as a no nonsense individual, if anything too no nonsense. But I have watched other sweeter, nicer people get eaten up by the kids and adults. Sandusky, left himself far too wide open. And in a society that has: but abandoned shame as a mechanism for instruction, decided that children are small adults, has exposed them to environments and circumstances reserved for adults, exposed them them to all manner of entertainment, has adopted a principle that support for the child is paramount over support for the adults responsible for those children, has a lot to answer for these child abuse anomolies. I had no idea what sexual asfixiation was until teenagers explained it to me — and did so from experience. Not only was the what they knew shocking, but that they felt full of themselves sharing it with an adult. To wit I made my view known immediately.

I was listening to Judith Reisman, for the first time in the last two days and we had better figure out a way to curtail the genie so blythely let out the box in the 1970’s and late 1960’s. Today’s youth are quite adept at turning the tables with no warning and with very little motive and even no motive known to them or at all — just because. I have seen one child turn entire cafeterias into nightmares. Counselors and staff into two years begging the child to stop. Bad seed isn’t just a movie, and a bad seed with a few followers is a horror story.

I think children should be protected and the best way of doing that is to ensure the adults that are not their parents make sure they prtect themselves. My position is in no manner a defense of pedophilia by anyone. My position is not a pander to a soft on crime advocacy. In the two scenarios: Sandusky and the Catholic Church, both comprised a relatively small number given the level of child exposure, too many adults left with a single children alone for too long, in too many instances is asking for trouble. Though it shouldn’t be. In most of my experience the adults were a much bigger problem, but that is unusual.

I think there ought to be a great deal, more caution exercised in some commentary. I am not advocating censorship by anyone, but themselves.

And I am keenly aware that I am swimming upstream — I carry my own paddles.